I’m going to write what almost amounts to a short summary of
my last post because I very much want to get my point across, although the
scant response to that post suggests that some readers tire of the subject, while others simply
won’t read such a long post. So…

I’ve written much of my admiration for the writer Margaret Deland (1857-1945). She was raised a hardcore
Calvinist Presbyterian (a viciously cruel sect that, like my own boyhood
church, I would label as child abuse), but married a Unitarian, and the two of
them eventually became liberal Bostonian Episcopalians. One day during church, it came
upon Margaret that she no longer believed any of the central doctrines of
Christianity, and this led her to walk out of the service. Having thus
discarded religion as the foundation of her life, she became obsessed with the
question of how to survive in a world that contains both love and death.

This
is also my challenge. Without love, I suppose I would kill myself, but with love comes such pain that I can’t
see my way to survive it because I know that death ultimately destroys both
love and the belovèd. Margaret means a lot to me, not because she found
answers that I can accept, but because she struggled with the same question, a
question that partially erases the chasm of the 140 years that have passed
since she asked it.

I
try very hard to understand how people can believe in God in order that I too might believe,
yet I know that belief isn’t based upon verifiable evidence, and this makes it untenable
for me. Just as believers sometimes suspect that I really do believe—based
upon my inability to walk away from religion—I suspect that they don’t, or
else they wouldn’t be forever “praying for faith,” going through “crises of
faith,” and experiencing “dark nights of the soul,” terms that would seem to
imply a hell-bent determination to believe that which one knows isn’t true. I cannot imagine that a person who thinks deeply
can be a believer. Rather, I think it requires putting a brake upon one’s
thoughts, only how can any intelligent person do so?

But
don’t atheists don’t do the same thing? Just as believers set their face toward
ignoring doubts about God, is it not true that atheists tend to ignore doubts
about whether humanism justifies existence? Socrates said that the unexamined
life isn’t worth living, but perhaps he was wrong, and it’s the superficial
life toward which we should aim. Otherwise, why would those believers and
atheists who imagine themselves happier than I, tell me that my problem is that
I think too much. Think too much?! Can
it really be that a good life depends upon floating on the mind’s surface, because
to dive into the depths is to trade light and warmth for frigidity and
death? Such observations as I have been able to make would seem to suggest that
it is so. But what then, does our choice come down to buying happiness at the expense of intellectual integrity?

This
is where I get stumped. Namely, do we have a moral right to be shallow, if not
outright dishonest, with ourselves, in the pursuit of happiness? I just know
that I can’t do it. You could entice me with money, or you could beat with a
rod, and I still couldn’t pull it off, yet it would be senseless for me to
boast of my integrity when I’m only doing that for which I have no choice.

While
it’s true that one can live a good life without God—that is, a life of kindness
and caring—this doesn’t resolve the dilemma but rather accentuates the fact
that love exists against a background of eternal non-existence that swallows-up
both the love and the belovèd. It is therefore true
that love gives limited meaning to life even while accentuating the ultimate futility of life, and of what comfort is this?

In
a very deep sense, it’s true that I am religious because of my view that only
religion can give a foundation to life. I was taught this from my earliest
awareness, and it is, perhaps, the only part of what I was taught that I cannot
abandon because while I can laugh about whether God cares about baptism by
immersion, or whether women should remain silent in church, I can’t laugh about
whether God represents the only eternal meaning to life, and, yes, eternity
matters to me, deeply. Despite what religious people think, this is not a
common sentiment among atheists, but it is who I am. While most atheists view
religion as a disease to be cured, I view it as the sine qua non of life, yet I can’t embrace it, and the efforts of
religious people to help me only accentuate the gulf between us.